Instant Messaging and Holidays
Yes, I know… I’m spamming my weblog 
I thought that I should just write all these posts down in Word, and then post them throughout the week, but I’d rather put everything up now, so I can think about other things the rest of the week ( … like presentations … and reports … and session plans … ).
So, my revelation about MSN is that … It is a lifesaver when one has two group assignments due and can’t meet group mates in person because everyone is on two weeks holidays. Everyone in both of my groups are spread out all over the city, pretty much everyone has a job of some kind and then we all want to go out on Friday night to spend some time with friends. So, there has been no time for anyone to meet up in the past two weeks. Instead, we all hop on MSN when we need to and have a ’silent’ conversation online. It’s really good because we can get everything we need to get done, done, without having to worry about travelling for an hour or more each to meet up somewhere. And we can work on our assignment as we talk, adding bits of suggestions from other group members and organising work over the next week or so. I sound like a promotion for IM but I think that it worked really well for the groups I was in.
I found that there were two problems from my perspective. I tried to keep myself online for as long as possible, purely so that if someone needed to contact me, they could. The problem was that sometimes I needed to talk to someone and they weren’t online. Due to recent updates of the msn system, you can actually leave a message for someone and they will get it when they sign in, but in some situations, I needed an answer urgently and I didn’t know when or if the person would sign in.
The second problem I had was that I couldn’t go to uni, use my laptop to connect wirelessly, and have my MSN work. It has something to do with the way that uni maintains the security of my wireless connection, but it is very annoying. I found a website, meebo, where I could sign in using my MSN account and I should be able to chat as normal. I signed in and tried to chat, but it didn’t work, nobody replied to me… so I was either being ignored, or I wasn’t doing something right.
Anyway, I think that overall, using IM during the holidays was extremely useful and i will definitely do it again. (and possibly see if I can reference this post in the synchronous technology wiki ^_^)
